


If I'm Far From Home

by Hapalochlaena



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Season: Marielda, sibling relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 08:02:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29381766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hapalochlaena/pseuds/Hapalochlaena
Summary: Maybe the real map to paradise was the sibling disagreements we had along the way.
Relationships: Edmund Hitchcock & Ethan Hitchcock
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	If I'm Far From Home

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Hey Brother by Avicii

Before they’re the same person, the Hitchcocks are just two small boys on an old oxcart, travelling from Nacre to Marielda. The sky overhead is very clear and very blue, and the road stretches on forever. The journey stopped feeling like an adventure several hours ago, the bright edge of excitement eroding away with time and dirt and the steady rattle of the cart. Every time they go over some bump or pothole Ethan feels the jolt of it right through to his bones.

Beside him, Edmund shifts. His leg brushes against Ethan’s.

“Stop it,” Ethan hisses.

“I’m bored,” Edmund whines.

His leg knocks against Ethan’s again, intentionally this time. Ethan knocks back, putting his whole bodyweight into it. Edmund shoves him off and Ethan yells “Dad, Dad Edmund’s shoving me!”

“Edmund, don’t shove Ethan,” their father says absently.

Ethan kicks Edmund’s leg in triumph. Edmund digs a skinny elbow viciously into his ribs as retaliation and Ethan shoves him away.

“Dad, now he’s doing it!”

Ethan shoves him again, hard enough that his brother goes toppling over against the side of the cart. Edmund kicks him, properly this time, intending to hurt, and suddenly the situation goes from fractious to vicious.

It’s not the first fight they’ve had on this journey. Neither of them are used to sitting still for so long. It’s easier to be restless and irritable than it is to be scared.

The cart jerks to a halt. Their father looks back at them.

“He started it,” Ethan says quickly.

“Boys,” their father says. “Boys.” He sighs. There’s something new in his face, something tense and tired as he regards them. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he says eventually. “And you have to promise to listen really carefully, okay? This is important.”

That’s how it begins, in an oxcart on the road to Marielda, two motherless boys watching out for a mansion with utmost vigilance and attention.

The mansion, when they finally find it, looks nothing at all like Ethan expected.

To the side, he sees his own doubt mirrored on Edmund’s face. “Is this it?”

_ Is this it? _ Where’s the mansion of his childhood stories? It’s sprawling, weed-choked, obviously long-since abandoned. Ethan’s spent enough time sneaking into - stealing from - Chrysanthemum mansions to know what rich people’s houses should look like, and this isn’t it.

“Looks haunted,” Ethan says for the sake of needling him.

Edmund shudders obligingly. “ _ Don’t _ .”

“Well, I’m going in. You can stay out here if you’re scared. Alone. In this dark wood which is probably full of ghosts.”

“I’m not - what! Ethan!”

“ _ Edmund _ ,” Ethan mimics. He heads into the mansion. He doesn’t need to look back to know that Edmund will follow.

Years later and Ethan’s rattling around in that same mansion like a sword in a sheath too big for it.

It hadn’t occurred to him, when he left Marielda, that he might arrive at his destination to find somebody else already there. The mansion always felt like a secret, something which existed for the Hitchcocks alone.

Samol seems happy enough to have the company, not that Ethan ever considered he might not be welcome. Not that he’d have left even if he wasn’t. Nobody will ever tell Captain Hitchcock where he can or cannot go, even when only half of him’s gone there.

It takes Ethan an embarrassingly long time to work out who Samol is. In his defence, Samol doesn’t look much like a god. He’s not Samothes, regal and distant at the head of an army or sitting glorious on his throne. He’s just an old man with impossibly blue eyes, an intense, bluer-than-blue shade that Ethan swears he’s seen somewhere before. He plays guitar and likes to tell Ethan stories about his sons and grandson, who used to live in this house.

“My mother used to play here as a child,” Ethan says in response. He hates the feeling that Samol has more legitimate claim to the mansion than he does.

When he finally figures it out he remembers Maelgwyn and thinks  _ oh, that’s why Samol’s eyes look so familiar _ .

Ethan isn’t sure what to do with the candlestick he stole from Samothes’ volcano. In the end he leaves it standing in the room where half a map used to hang, like the punchline to a joke. When Edmund arrives they can laugh about it. But days pass, and the room across from Ethan’s remains stubbornly empty.

The mansion smells of damp and rotting wood. Samol busies himself cleaning it up, scrubbing away filth and mould and throwing open windows to let air into spaces too long closed and stale.

“Can’t you just fix it?” Ethan asks.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“I meant,” Ethan says, “like with your god magic? Can’t you just snap your fingers and then it’s fixed?”

“If you think I’m going too slow then how ‘bout you make yourself helpful?” Samol says irritably.

Ethan makes himself helpful, which is to say he stumbles around dropping things and getting underfoot while Samol loses his temper and yells at him. Eventually Samol forbids Ethan from doing anything more complicated than sweeping the floor. Ethan still makes sure to knock something over with the broom every so often, just in case.

He burns the food when he has to cook it, until he realises that Samol would be perfectly delighted to eat a handful of mud as long as he didn’t have to dig it up from the garden with his own two hands, and the only person suffering from Ethan’s culinary ineptitude is Ethan himself.

For the most part, though, Ethan explores.

The mansion has lain undisturbed in the years since the Hitchcocks found it. Sometimes Ethan stumbles upon traces of their earlier visit, footprints in the dust. His or Edmund’s? It’s a trick question: there’s no difference. They have the same size feet, same length of stride, same distribution of weight, same metal-soled cavalry boots.

Isn’t Edmund the one who’s afraid of ghosts? He scuffs a toe through the footprints and watches the dust swirl itself into new cartographies.

The mansion inside occupies so much more space than could ever be guessed from the outside. It reminds him of Reconfiguration, the way the mansion unfolds and refolds itself again and again, hitherto unconsidered nooks and crannies spilling out into corridors branching into vast empty rooms where Ethan’s single set of footsteps echo like someone’s just followed him in.

“Did I ever tell you,” Samol says one day, apropos of nothing; Ethan privately thinks that Samol enjoys the sound of his own voice a little too much. “about how I was born? Before I was here, all there was was nothing. When I came into being that gave a shape to things which didn’t exist to be shaped before. Everyone else, they get that from me. Gods a little more than the rest of you, but everyone who lives, every material being, you all shape the world around you a little bit, just by existing.”

Ethan carries the absence of his brother with him. The lack of Edmund makes itself known in the echo of his footsteps, in the way his shadow falls when seen from the corner of his own eye, in his own face briefly glimpsed in a mirror. He can turn any room into a room which doesn’t have Edmund in it, just by existing.

When they come home with Memoriam College burning behind them, Edmund locks himself in his room and won’t come out.

Ethan isn’t too concerned to start with. The Hitchcocks have always had a tendency to sulk. Ethan is willing to confess to this as probably their least attractive personality trait, if only because he hates it when his brother ignores him. Edmund will marinate in his own emotions for an hour or maybe a couple of days, until he remembers that actually sulking alone with yourself is really boring and decides to get his act together.

“Do you think he’s okay?” Aubrey asks, staring at the closed door with big worried eyes.

“Of course,” Ethan says with a shrug. He can pull double shifts at the dancing-and-duelling school for a while. Fair’s fair, after all, and this is probably payback for Ethan doing the exact same shit to Edmund after the Crosstown job.

Days pass and Edmund still shows no sign of leaving his room. “You know I’m going to make you take so many double shifts at the school when you come out of there, right?” Ethan says loudly to the door. Fair might be fair, but being a twin means everything is split equally. He considers and adds, “Of course, if you come out in time to take my place at this stupid briefing we have to do, all will be forgiven.”

Edmund doesn’t take him up on the offer and Ethan spends a couple of painfully boring hours listening to Sige and Castille talk while Aubrey stares into space.

When he goes back to check on Edmund Beans is there, whining and scrabbling at the bottom of the door, and Edmund doesn’t open the door a crack to let the dog in.

That’s when Ethan starts to worry. What  _ happened _ to his brother, while Ethan was lying around in a pile of dogs, drinking cheap whiskey and feeling sorry for himself?

The rest of the six don’t know either, and even Caroline Fair-Play can only tell him that there was a void nun. “But he seemed pretty badly off already when I found him? I think he got beaten up by a priest or something.”

“What’s a void nun?” Ethan asks, and then pretends the explanation makes sense to him so she’ll stop trying to explain.

“Shouldn’t you already know this, anyway?” she asks. “You’re twins, can’t you think each other’s thoughts?”

“What?” Ethan says. “No! That’s not how it works, that’s - why would you think that’s how it works?”

“Your brother,” Caroline says, “is an idiot.”

Edmund lies in bed, or sometimes sits slumped into a ball with his arms wrapped around himself. The mere effort of being alive seems to exhaust him. When he sleeps he wakes up screaming and Ethan isn’t sure whether that or the silence of his waking hours is worse.

He brings Edmund his favourite foods and the cheap pastries they used to steal from market stalls as children; they only cost a few pennies, but both Hitchcocks agree they taste better when stolen. Edmund picks listlessly at whatever he’s given but more often than not loses interest halfway through and leaves the food to go cold and congeal.

Ethan makes sure to keep his brother updated on the daily business of being Captain E. Hitchcock, but Edmund never responds. When Ethan tries to coax him into conversation Edmund just pulls the blanket over his head and says, “Leave me alone. I’m tired.”

“You’ve got to get out of bed some time,” Ethan tells him.

“Go  _ away _ .”

Eventually he resorts to dragging Caroline Fair-Play over to Edmund’s door and loudly betting her that today,  _ today _ is the day Edmund will leave his room.

“Maestro Hitchcock, I don’t want to take your money,” says Caroline.

“I’m not betting you with my money,” Ethan explains. What would be the point of that? “I’m betting you with  _ Edmund’s. _ ”

“That doesn’t make it any better actually,” says Caroline.

Ethan picked the wrong partner in crime for this, obviously. Castille wouldn’t have hesitated to take him for everything Edmund had.

When does Captain Hitchcock sleep? There’s the dancing school in the daytime and the duelling school at night, heists with the Six and the fiasco with the Fontmen and all the usual cons, drinking and gambling and an ill-advised rooftop duel and strongly-worded letters written to the Bureau of Reconfiguration. The man fills his life so full you’d think there’d have to be two of him at least.

Edmund arrives exhausted and travel-stained with a half-healed scar slitting his throat. His eyes are feverishly bright in his hollow face. Ethan, unsure whether to punch him or burst into tears, drags him inside.

He doesn’t know how to say  _ What took you so long? _ or  _ I missed you _ or  _ I’m still incredibly angry with you, you know _ , so instead Ethan tells him about the mansion. He’s spent so much time waiting for Edmund to be here and is only now realising his complete failure to plan for what he’d do now that he is. Edmund’s too thin, the kind of thinness which comes from more than a few days of travelling on an empty stomach. How long has this been a problem? How did Ethan not notice that one of them was fading away? He saw they were identical because that’s what he expected to see. He knows he’s babbling; he feels as brittle as Edmund looks.

Why is this so difficult? Somewhere along the line, without ever noticing the change, they’ve become strangers to each other. Ethan drags Edmund outside to meet Samol, because he feels more comfortable interacting with his brother when there’s a buffer between them. This is what they’ve come to.

Edmund tells him, hesitantly, about what happened at the volcano after Ethan left it. How many times have the Hitchcocks done this, sat across from each other while discussing their shared life? The familiarity of it should be comforting. Years of practise have made an easy shorthand between them. Edmund can sketch out a scene with only a few brief lines. Who stood where. What they said, and how they looked when they said it. When Ethan closes his eyes he can see himself there, watching from Edmund’s perspective the events he saw from the train as the city folded itself into new configurations under his feet. It’s not until Edmund puts a concerned hand on his shoulder that Ethan realises he has a hand pressed to his throat.

Ethan still hasn’t decided whether or not he forgives him.

“You should get some rest,” he says.

He sleeps fitfully and dreams of

\-  _ chasing his brother through a burning Marielda which reconfigures itself around him with every step he takes. Within moments he’s hopelessly lost, but ahead of him there’s always the glimpse of his twin’s blue coat just vanishing around a corner or between two buildings. As long as he keeps up it will be fine. _

_ The heat of the fire is close behind him now. As Marielda reconfigures again and again the mausoleum looms suddenly before him and he realises with a jerk like the sensation of falling just as you hit sleep that’s where he was being led all along _ -

He wakes with his heart pounding.

When Edmund finally leaves his room it’s with an absolute lack of ceremony. Ethan, still blinking himself awake from too few hours of sleep, stumbles blearily downstairs one morning to find Edmund and Castille sitting at a table.

Edmund’s drinking tea from a chipped mug. Castille doesn’t drink tea as such, but she likes to sit companionably with a cup and saucer. When she sees Ethan she says, “I’m glad to see you’re feeling better, Hitchcock.”

Beside her, Edmund takes a sip of his tea with an expression of perfect innocence. So that’s how it is.

“Much better, thank you,” Ethan says, sliding into a chair. “Good morning, Ethan.”

“Good morning, Edmund,” Edmund replies.

Ethan had assumed Edmund leaving his room was all that needed to happen. They’d pick up as they left off, and everything would return to normal.

He was wrong. Ethan tries to pretend otherwise, but he can’t deny that Edmund’s changed. He’s a little slower, a little softer, a little more easily daunted and less willing to take risks than he was before. On the topic of Memorium College he remains utterly silent. It becomes a gulf in Captain Hitchcock’s memory, a shared question to which only one of them knows the answer.

Captain E. Hitchcock dances and Captain E. Hitchcock duels and Ethan and Edmund pass conversations and conflicts between each other like coins in the palm of the hand with no-one ever the wiser. They’re awkward, out of sync, fumbling where there used to be a smooth transition. Ethanandedmund are suddenly Ethan and Edmund, discrete entities. No-one can tell the difference between them and that must mean the difference isn’t really there.

He’s still healing, Ethan tells himself. He just needs time.

Time passes. Pala-din vanish from the street as the war with Samot intensifies. The news from the front doesn’t get any worse but does get more heavily censored, which everyone knows amounts to the same thing. The sun beats down on the streets with the force of a hammer blow and the usual hubbub of the city is briefly tempered as Marielda retreats to sit in the shade and fan itself lazily.

The week of High Sun Day dawns. The countdown begins.

The same mansion which was far too big for Samol and Ethan suddenly becomes several sizes too small when it’s expected to house Samol and Ethan and Edmund. It’s been years since the Hitchcocks last spent so much time together. Being one man with two bodies takes quick thinking and careful co-ordination, but mostly it takes not being seen in the same place at the same time.

Samol’s presence makes the space a little bigger than it otherwise might have been. Without him there to act as a buffer, Ethan and Edmund might have attempted fratricide in under a week. Instead, it takes them a little more than two.

They’re playing cards, gambling with whatever detritus they find in their pockets: matchsticks, cigarettes, a few coins, the stub of a candle, a stone with a hole in it. They coaxed Samol into playing with them for a while, but he didn’t last long before throwing down his hand and denouncing them as shameless cheats, so now it’s just Ethan shuffling the cards while Edmund keeps a watchful eye on his hands in case of trickery.

The way the Hitchcocks see it, it’s practically  _ duty _ to cheat each other at cards, to keep each other sharp and make sure they never become complacent in their ability to pick up on a lie. But Ethan isn’t so sure, these days, how much he likes the reminder that his brother is capable of deceiving him.

“I can’t believe Maelgwyn never told us he knew our mother,” Ethan says suddenly.

He’s half-heartedly hoping to distract Edmund into losing focus, but Edmund’s eyes never leave the cards and he just says absently, “I knew.”

“You knew,” Ethan echoes. It’s been surprisingly easy to forget how angry he is with Edmund, except that he never really forgets at all. The noise when he slaps the stack of cards down on the table is louder than he’d intended. Edmund jumps. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I -“ Edmund starts, but Ethan keeps going, faster, louder, sharper-edged. Edmund’s softer than he used to be; when Ethan goes on the offensive he can’t keep up.

“I deserved to know! This isn’t like - it’s personal, it’s _ ours _ to know and you kept it from me!”

Had Samothes known? Sitting on his throne as Edmund offered him a glass of champagne from his own table, had he found in the Hitchcocks’ features some trace or echo of that girl he’d known?

“Didn’t you think I had a right to know?” Ethan demands. “I could’ve - I could’ve asked him…” He doesn’t know what he’d have asked Maelgwyn, not really. Anything. Everything. What colour were her eyes? Do I remind you of her? He’d been so young the last time he’d seen her.

They’re not good people. Ethan’s always known that. They’re scoundrels and criminals and they’ve killed so many people they’ve stopped keeping track. But he’d always thought they could trust each other.

“I was going to tell you,” Edmund says helplessly. “I  _ was _ . I swear, I didn’t mean for you to not know. There was just, there was no time, things kept happening -“

“There was time!” Ethan’s chair clatters to the floor as he rises to his feet. The game’s forgotten now, the cards abandoned on the table between them. “There was so much time, Edmund all of you were planning this and none of you said a single thing to me and how could you, how could you!”

“Why does it matter!” Edmund shrieks. “It wouldn’t have made any difference! He, Samothes, he knew we were coming, knowing or not knowing wouldn’t have changed anything. Nothing anyone did could possibly have made any difference so why does it matter!”

“It matters! It matters because we’re supposed to look out for each other and I can’t do that if you won’t  _ talk _ to me! How obvious does it have to be that you can’t look out for yourself before you -”

“How can I talk to you about something like that when you’re still naive enough to believe our father went looking for the  _ map _ ?”

That’s when Ethan lunges at him.

Samol tears them apart with the kind of strength only available to the absolutely furious. “What do you boys think you’re doing!” He shakes them like they’re a couple of recalcitrant children instead of a pair of grown scoundrels. “I’ll have no brawling in my house, you hear me? You apologise to each other!”

“He started it,” Ethan snarls. The inside of his mouth tastes of blood and he can feel a bruise already blooming on his cheek where Edmund hit him. It doesn’t satisfy him at all to know his brother isn’t any better off. There are strips of his flesh under Ethan’s fingernails.

“I don’t care who started it,” Samol tells them firmly. “I’m ending it.” He shakes Ethan again and says, “I’ve had just about enough of the pair of you, you hear me. You think you’re the only one hurting here? You think you’re the only one who’s upset and angry? You’re not, so apologise!  _ Now _ .”

“Why are you taking his side! You should hate him!  _ He killed your son! _ ”

He knows, even as the words leave his mouth, that he’s gone too far.

“Fix your problems or get out of my house,” Samol says, and leaves.

What the Hitchcocks are looking for is half a map.

The first thing you learn, looking for maps in Marielda, is that the map is not the territory. A map is an abstraction, reality simplified and reduced to a sheet of paper you can hold in your hands. You can look at a map of Hieron and watch as the Heat and the Dark obliterates it under ink the colour of the end of the world, but it won’t tell you a single thing about the way a family falls apart.

In the Six’s belowground lair Ethan and Edmund stack black-market cartography books ten high and find a thousand maps of Marieldas which only exist in memory. Every map is a map of yesterday’s Marielda, as the world turns and the city reconfigures and reconfigures and reconfigures.

When Ethan sees Edmund on High Sun Day it shouldn’t feel like the betrayal it is.

Ethan’s resplendent in full dress uniform with the glitter of unearned medals pinned to his chest. He looks daring and dashing and more than a little rakish with his moustache waxed into a fine curl.

Then the door to his room opens and there’s his brother in the undecorated blue of a field uniform. The effect is so disorientating that Ethan has to glance down at himself to check Primo didn’t accidentally bring him the wrong uniform.

They’ve been mirror images ever since they first realised how much mischief two small boys can get up to when everyone thinks there’s only one small boy. It shouldn’t matter that they didn’t have the opportunity to confer. In any given situation, working off the same information, the Hitchcocks will usually make the same decisions. Aren’t twins supposed to be able to think each other’s thoughts? Their ruse would never have worked if they weren’t at least that similar.

Half a map’s not the same thing as half a person. The map is not the territory, and his brother’s body isn’t the map of his own. Ethan’s dressed for a party; Edmund’s dressed for a battlefield. In retrospect, Ethan really should have realised sooner.

Samol’s almost impossible to find when he doesn’t want to be found, or maybe Ethan’s just too reluctant to search for him properly. Eventually Ethan finds him outside, pulling up weeds from the flowerbeds like each straggly green stem has personally wronged him.

“Don’t just stand there gawking.”

“I don’t know which ones are weeds,” Ethan says helplessly.

“Learn.”

Ethan sits down next to him and prods aimlessly through the dirt. He has no idea what he’s looking for. The Hitchcocks are city boys and Ethan never learnt to garden. It was always Aubrey who maintained the small collection of plants they kept at the dancing-and-duelling school. Ethan thinks most of them were ingredients for her alchemy. He probably should have asked her about it when he had the chance.

_ I’m sorry _ , he thinks, but the words seem too small for what he said. “I don’t know what I can say,” he confesses.

“Sorry would be a good start.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry ain’t always enough.”

There’s silence for a long moment. Samol’s long clever fingers dig into the dirt, pull out another weed. There’s dirt caked around his fingernails and in the cracks of his knuckles. Physicality alive.

“I’m angry,” Samol says, voice icy. “I’m furious, as a matter of fact. Don’t you dare act like I’m not. But there’s not a thing happened in that volcano that Samothes didn’t embrace with open arms. That boy knew what was coming for him and he welcomed it. I can feel what I like about that, but blaming your brother for it makes as much sense as blaming the sword for doing the stabbing.”

“You can hate him if you want to,” Ethan says. “I do.”

"Now I don't think you do," Samol says. "You might be angry at him, sure, maybe you even feel like he betrayed you, but you don't hate him. Plenty of times I've been angrier at my family than I've known what to do with. He’s your brother. That doesn’t always mean what it should, but you wouldn't be half so angry at him if you didn't love him."

“I think we’ve forgotten how to be brothers,” Ethan mutters.

“Now you’re just being self-pitying,” Samol says mercilessly.

“You can’t tell me that if - if Maelgwyn walked up to you, right now, that you’d just forgive him for what he did.”

“Probably I wouldn’t,” Samol agrees. “It ain’t the kind of thing you can forgive easy. But I love that boy, no matter what he’s done.”

“He knew my mother when they were children, did you know?” Ethan says, and then suddenly the words are pouring out. “Edmund knew and he didn’t… he didn’t tell me. I could have asked him about her, I could - I don’t remember her very well, you know, and I don’t think Edmund does either, but he didn’t tell me. Like it was his secret to keep.”

Samol is silent.

“I’m sorry,” Ethan says again, and finds he means it this time. “For what I said to you. I’m sorry.”

Samol just says, “That’s a start.”

He doesn’t look for Edmund. Can’t bring himself to, if he’s honest, not with the anger and betrayal and guilt all curdling together inside him. Ethan goes to bed and wakes in the middle of the night to Edmund shaking him awake with more concern than urgency.

“Ethan,” Edmund whispers. “Are you awake?” In the darkness he’s not much more than a silhouette.

“No,” Ethan lies and closes his eyes again as if to prove it. He feels the mattress depress as Edmund sits on the bed beside him.

“Move over,” Edmund tells him, hitting at the lump of Ethan’s legs beneath the blanket until he obeys. “I had a nightmare.”

“So you decided to make it my problem?” Ethan rolls over and tries to pull the blanket over his head, except it’s pinned in place by Edmund’s weight. “You’re too old to be frightened by ghost stories. Go back to sleep.”

“I don’t want to fight anymore,” Edmund says bleakly. “The world’s ending.” He hesitates, and then says, “I had a lot of nightmares. After Memoriam. You know, I promised Samothes that if he didn’t let me die in my sleep I wouldn’t steal his candlestick?”

It takes Ethan a while to work out what he’s talking about. “So?” he retorts. “I can steal a candlestick if I decide to. I wasn’t about to leave with nothing, not after all the trouble we went to get there.”

Edmund’s silent for a long time and then eventually he says, “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t  _ want _ to tell you. You wouldn’t... you wouldn’t have understood.”

“Wouldn’t I?”

“No.” Edmund says it with a kind of terrible certainty. “You’ve never felt like that, you’ve never experienced that kind of powerlessness. It’s like - you can’t stop it. Nothing you can say or do will make any difference. All you can do is wait until it’s over. You couldn’t understand. I didn’t  _ want _ you to understand. Ethan,” he says. “ _ Ethan _ . The world’s ending.”

The world’s ending. Samol’s dying. There’s nothing either of them can do to prevent it. “You still could’ve tried. You shouldn’t have to carry something like this all by yourself. What’s the point of family if we can’t share the burdens?” Ethan says, “None of this works if we don’t talk to each other.”

Edmund’s silent for so long that Ethan starts to think he’s fallen asleep sitting up. Eventually he says, “I’m so tired of having nightmares.”

Ethan lifts up a corner of the blanket for him. “If you snore I’m kicking you out, I hope you realise that.”

He doesn’t snore, but that hardly matters. Edmund’s always been a terrible person to share a bed with. This is as true now as it was when they were children, curled together on the single bare mattress. He makes weird snuffling noises and mutters in his sleep, and more than once he hits Ethan in the face when he starts thrashing around. At one point he rolls over and takes more than his fair share of the blankets with him. Ethan tolerates this, lying there under the meagre corner of blanket Edmund allows him and listening to the still-familiar rhythms of Edmund’s breathing until dawn light starts to filter into the room, at which point he realises he hasn’t slept a wink all night and creeps out of his own bed and across the hall into Edmund’s.

“What I don’t understand,” Edmund says, “is the map.”

It’s a glorious summer day. The sky overhead is the same blue as Samol’s eyes. The Hitchcocks are sprawled in the grass outside while Samol sits in a deckchair, tuning his old guitar. Edmund’s industriously pulling up handfuls of grass and flicking them into Ethan’s hair while Ethan pretends to ignore him.

“Like,” Edmund continues, “it was supposed to be a map to paradise? But it was just a map of the Heat and the Dark.”

“It was a map of Hieron,” Samol corrects him, “which is to say a map of me.” He gives his guitar a thoughtful strum and makes another minute adjustment.

“That doesn’t really explain it,” Ethan complains.

“A family portrait,” Edmund says. He drops a worm directly onto Ethan’s face. Ethan sits bolt upright with a yell of disgust, brushing the worm away and shaking his head to get rid of the grass. Edmund laughs at him, because the best con Edmund ever pulled was convincing people that he was the nice twin.

“I made this place for my sons,” Samol says. “Gave it to them as a present. They were happy here, for a little while. Guess you could say they made a kind of paradise here. But when things started to fall apart, well. Making paradise out of anything is hard work. Guess Samot figured it he could fix the Heat and the Dark, if he could fix  _ me _ , he could fix the rest of it too.” He says, “You can’t hold a family together just by wanting. Not even gods can do that. In times of stress people can cleave apart as easily as they can come together. You boys should know that as well as any”

Ethan gets to his feet. “I’m tired of maps,” he declares, and extends a hand to his brother. Edmund follows him upright and lets Ethan tug him forwards.

There’s no map anywhere which will let you chart a course from here to a happy family. The damage isn’t healed yet, and likely the scar will always remain, but for now the Hitchcock boys dance to the sound of Samol's old guitar in the garden where their mother and Samol's grandson used to play.


End file.
